


The Lost Boy

by RobinTheArtist



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Human, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Slavery, Tutor!Marshall Lee
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:47:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinTheArtist/pseuds/RobinTheArtist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marshall Lee fully accepted the fact that one day, for no reason, he would die, and it would be all Prince Bubba's fault. </p><p>If only he could care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Marshall Lee was young, he saw the King once. Not directly, of course, but through a crowded plaza. Even so, it was far too close. His skin itched, like the air around the royal family had burrowed under his flesh and clung to his bones. 

That was years ago. What had been an itch was a burn, a slow simmering heat bubbling up like a coal pressed against his back. 

Marshall Lee knows that's an accurate description, because he's actually felt that. 

He thought it would be avoidable. That he could just stick to his little corner of Ooo, and live in peace. 

But that was before the Kingdom pushed forward and his forest was taken. 

He was taken with it. 

The King was a ruthless man indeed, and as a prisoner of a lost, one-sided war, he was given directly to the royal. When he first met him, Marshall Lee was in chains, and the King was smirking at the Lost Boy. 

Marshall spat in his face. 

That was the first time Marshall Lee knew what it was like to burn. 

 

Marshall Lee was educated. He knew how to read and write in several languages, had a grasp on politics and literature and science. 

Knowledge made capture that much more unbearable. 

If one thing made his arrangement tolerable, it was that he was a skilled. He became a tutor, rather than a laborer. And while he was still a slave, he could at least remain inside while pondering life. 

That's when he met the prince again. 

Violinists, it seemed, were rare in the country of Ooo. Marshall Lee had learned from his mother, a refugee and eventual heretic. When she was killed, Marshall Lee, and Marceline, wherever she was, were rarities. 

Prince Bubba drove that fact in for Marshall Lee. When he picked up a bow, the Lost Boy felt as if he'd been struck, and would often snatch the instrument away. At first, Marshall Lee would snap at the boy. 

Within a month, he'd realized the attempt was futile, and he'd just play softly while the boy studied sciences and maths, and they'd both revel in the peace. 

If asked, Marshall Lee would say that he only played the violin for himself. He'd refuse to say that he would often watch from his peripheral vision as the tension bled from Bubba's shoulders. 

Artists are only artists when they have an audience, after all. 

 

Marshall Lee ended up becoming a friend to Bubba, which put him into the odd position of loving something his enemy possessed. He could not say the enemy, the King, loved his son, because that would be lying. 

The King, Marshall Lee observed, had no feelings. He could mimic them for the sake of diplomacy, and whenever he had a hot coal pressed against Marshall Lee's skin and a taste of the Lost Boy's blood, he was satisfied, sated, but love and compassion were beyond his gray-scale spectrum of emotions. 

Even so, Marshall Lee found peace in the company of his sun, enjoyed the silence the sophisticated youth carried with him. When he tied back his strawberry-blonde hair and came to lessons with his face and hands stained by oils and paints Marshall Lee couldn't help his small smile. Bubba was a light in Marshall Lee's purgatory, even if he couldn't play violin or speak Italian to save his life. 

 

"Why does he keep calling you a lost boy?"

Bubba's voice carried over Marshall Lee's soft melody, the tutor not even stuttering as his fingers trailed over the violin strings with the gentle caress of a butterflies wings. 

"Because your father fancies himself one Captain Hook," he replied lightly in his clipped, accented voice. 

Bubba had rolled his eyes at the tutor. "You know what I mean, Mar. What's a Lost Boy?"

Marshall Lee put his violin down with a quite exhale. "The forest was its own kingdom, once, comprised entirely of orphans. They made homes with the discarded supplies of Ooo, and slept in trees where they built their nests. The birds were their alarm clocks, and they took care of each other."

Bubba nodded, and though he and Marshall Lee were both seventeen, he allowed the Lost Boys fairy tale vernacular. 

"And then, one day, an evil man came in and burned the fucking forest. Everyone died, and from the ashes, slaves and prostitutes and thieves and murderers were born."

Marshall Lee resumed playing, a haunted melody born of pain and shame bleeding out of his battered soul, and Bubba tried to understand why.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a while. I'm not going to excuse my absence, or promise a timely update. Stay if you'd like, if not, may we part as better strangers.

"My father has seemed to have taken a liking to you."

"On the contrary," Marshall Lee replies, tuning the fragile instrument before him. The King's palace is made of delicate things, breakable things. The man himself is forged of iron, but Marshall Lee knows he sits on a throne of glass. One day, he hopes to watch it shatter. "Your father quite hates me."

"Why?"

Bubba has a smear of grease under his left eye. Marshall Lee reaches out, swipes over the mess with his thumb so that the stain clings to his flesh rather than the young prince. Bubba reaches up, touches Marshall Lee's wrist, trapping him there. Like everything in the palace, his touch is delicate as a moth's wings. The tutor stares into his ward's eyes, eyes as blue as his father's are not. They hold admiration the likes of which Marshall Lee has never seen directed towards him, not in his palace life. 

He pulls away, shows the stain on his thumb. "To your father, I am a relic to a time he considers long passed."

"You say that as if the times of the Lost Boys aren't over," Bubba challenges the tutor, his cheeks still pink. 

Marshall Lee smirks, pulling his instrument up to his chin. "As long as I live, they are far from the history books."

 

Marshall Lee tastes blood in his mouth. His posture is stiff, despite the ache in his side. If he doesn't keep his back straight, his ribs will heal improperly. If he doesn't keep his back straight, Bubba will discover he's injured. The tutor hates the look in his charges eyes when he catches Marshall Lee wince, hates the schism forming in the prince's mind between the stories of the Great King, and the reality of The Lost Boy. 

Bubba still figures it out. He's quite perceptive. And clumsy. 

When he trips over his feet and tumbles into his tutor, Marshall Lee can't keep his tongue, shoving his fist into his mouth to stifle his yell. Bubba recoils as if burned, and helps Marshall Lee gingerly to his feet, arm wrapped around the injured tutors slumped shoulders, quietly leading him away. 

The maid is from the Kingdom, that much is obvious, but it appears her loyalties lie with the prince. She wraps Marshall Lee's chest to help his ribs heal, cleans and bandages the slice on his wrist, the cut on his face, his thigh. Then she is gone in a swish of skirts, and it's just Bubba and Marshall Lee in the prince's room. The tutor is steadfastly staring at the floor, until the prince steps over, cupping his chin. Marshall Lee looks up. Bubba's hand is soft as silk, his gaze even more so. 

"If my father asks, you are mine to do as I please with, and I will not have you attempt to teach me when injured."

Marshall Lee can taste paint that turned the led gold in his words. "And what is the real reason you've helped me?"

Bubba's thumb strokes along the tutor's jawline, barely there, a whisper of comfort. "Because you are my friend, and there are so few of those in the lion's den."

Marshall Lee reached up, brushing his fingers across Bubba's. "You are twice the man he'll ever be." 

"Fancy me a lost boy yet?"

"You are no lost boy," Marshall Lee grins. "You're Peter Pan."


	3. Chapter 3

Marshall Lee is no coward. The Lost Boys were only ever a breath away from dying, and they carried the burden of their mortality with them always. It was a comfort, on long nights where the camp fire stories were of the King's dungeons. The trick, Marshall Lee would tell the new boys, frightened of their own shadows and petrified by the King's, was to remember that every free breath they drew was an act of rebellion. That as long as the Lost Boys lived, the names of the dead would be heavy on the tongues of those left behind. 

Now, Marshall Lee was all that was left, and sometimes, the burden was so heavy the violinist could only speak in somber melodies from finely woven strings. He was a songbird, locked in the cemeteries wrought iron gates, without song, without family. 

Until Bubba took him to the maid, and saw each of his scars, the ones willingly earned with his brothers and sisters, the ones forcibly placed upon him by the prince's own father. 

"What are these?" Bubba asks, running over lines spaced evenly up Marshall Lee's forearms like a ruler. 

"Everyone I've lost," he violinist whispers into the fragile air between them. 

Bubba swallows. "You did this?"

"No."

And the prince looks down at the scarred expanse of Marshall Lee's arm with such contempt that the tutor can feel it burning where Bubba touches him. In the rage there is an intimacy. There is anger like a fire, like bitter dirt. But there is also sadness, such profound loss as Bubba begins to count the lines. And count, and count, and count. The realization that this boy's body was meant to keep tally through the loss of everyone he ever knew, his screaming rage in place of funeral bells, his arm the tombstone for dozens of children, scarred up to his shoulder, in pain, in mourning, alone with no one but a killer. 

Bubba had never felt a murderous rage before. He was gentle, a scientist, a keeper of knowledge. He valued life and family, and he detested war. 

But in that moment, he wanted nothing more than to see his father burn. 

 

 

Bubba had moved aside all the furniture, shoving couches against walls, pushing aside blackboards, carefully moving Marshall Lee's treasured violin. When he was done they had an entire floor to work with. Marshall Lee had watched him with vague amusement, witnessing his prince carry out such menial labors. 

Bubba finally straightens, and from the bag he'd brought with him, produced a sword. 

Marshall Lee was no longer amused. 

"What are you doing with that?" 

Bubba grins up at him. "I'm going to teach you sword fighting."

Marshall Lee's ribs had healed, and he was in a rare position of passable health. If there were a time to teach him, it would be now. If, being the key word. 

"Your father would have me killed if he found out-"

"So he won't," Bubba sighs, stepping over to Marshall Lee. Then, he did something the tutor never would have expected. 

Bubba drops to one knee, kneeling before Marshall Lee, holding the sheathed sword up, head down. He looked as if he were a squire presenting a weapon to his sire. 

"Marshall Lee, heir to the Kingdom of the Lost Boys, I humbly ask you serve by my side, and fight in the battles I am about to undertake. With this sword, I promise on my honor and my kingdom to defend you, to fight those who would have you harmed, to slay those who would have you killed," Bubba looks up, eyes hardened with a resolve Marshall Lee felt like a punch to the throat. "Fight with me."

The tutor reaches out, taking the sword and pulling it from its scabbard. In his hands was shining iron that Marshall Lee could tell had never seen the blood and fear of battle. It's blade was as long as his arm, it's handle a supple black leather, the pummel encrusted with rubies. Marshall Lee glances down at his prince, the son of his most sworn enemy, trusting him with a weapon, with his very life. 

"I will fight with you," he decides, reaching down to pull Bubba to his feet. He holds the prince's hand, even when he is steady on his feet, staring intently in the young man's eyes. "Your battles are mine. Any that would stand against you will fall to my blade, as long as I draw breath."

Bubba's face brakes into the widest grin, a smile so captivating Marshall Lee had no doubt that armies would follow him into the very pits of hell. "Together, we will make this Kingdom whole." 

And damned if Marshall Lee didn't believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you think, I read and respond to every comment.


End file.
